One Million Pre-Orders?

[Balandar]

The pre-orders from April has supposedly reached 1 Million. I'm not sure where they received the information from as ArenaNet has not given the numbers out yet (or so I thought).

"I expect Guild Wars 2 to sell 3.1 million copies after commercialization in August," Daewoo Securities analyst Kim Chang-kwean said by telephone. "Since April, the company has received 1 million pre-orders"

Here is the article from Korean Times.

[Kailand]

He he, if that estimate is true, then it beats SWTOR's 2 million copies sold when they did their Q3 update.

[robinj]

I recall reading back somewhere that "BioArts" said they would make a profit at less than 2M subscribers and for 2-3 months... did they?

Being in the game developer business though, 2000000*60 minus loans/prepayments from various investors and what not is quite a sizable debt. Some of the games I've worked on have grossed less than 100k and had a budget of less than that (not getting into it) but in the end it's all up to the marketing hype. BioWare definitely hyped TOR, and Arena Net is definitely hyping GW2 but in the end, who makes more money? GW2 has to capitalize on purchases of the game while EA got 2000000*15 for probably 2-3 months for most pre-orders/early subscribers, and is still making 500000*15 for those of whom still play... (or more)

[Balandar]

I think Bioware has better marketing, though they have crappy support and game design. I have yet to see a GW2 commercial, I wonder if they will go that route.

[Kailand]

With as many pre-purchases as what they have, they probabably don't need to make their own advertising to make a nice profit at launch, and you know that they only spent a fraction of what Bioware did on SWTOR (which was 200-300 million and from what I understand, SWTOR hasn't broken even yet, although they are probably close to it, and what was the rumour, bioware needed 400-500k subs to break even over the long term, including ongoing development costs and licencing fees). Most of GW2 profit is probably going to come from the cash shop.

If they do a GW2 advertising compaign, it really can't hurt their bottom line, but GW2 IP doesn't have the mass appeal of the star wars IP. As it is most of GW2 advertising is by word of mouth, the gaming press, and the stores selling the game, of which I see some advertising for it already.